ValleyCon 44 - Oct. 19-21 2018 | Ramada Fargo - Fargo, ND

Past Guests of ValleyCon 35

ValleyCon strives to bring the best and most relevant guests featured in sci-fi, fantasy, horror, comics, gaming and film & TV!
These guests include Media Icons, Artists, Authors, Psychics and many more. Autographs are available at one of the industry's LOWEST
price point ever. The guest will do panels, readings and demonstrations for your education and entertainment.

Peter Jurasik

Media Guest

Peter Jurasik is an actor best known for his television roles as Londo Mollari in the 1990s science fiction series Babylon 5 and Sid the Snitch on the 1980s series Hill Street Blues and its short-lived spinoff Beverly Hills Buntz.

'I was born at an early age and was close to my mother.' Early in the morning on April 25th, 1950 to be exact in New York, New York where I grew up in the ideals of middle class suburbia during the '50s. Memories of my childhood are golden sweet dreams filled with friends and family.

My high school years were at a Catholic seminary and it was here that I was cast in my first play -- Hey, Here's an interesting idea: I get to stand in the spotlight and talk out loud while everyone else sits quietly in the dark and politely listens to me. Eureka !! I have found it !! Acting swept me away from everything I thought I was and began to define everything about who I was becoming.

I graduated as an theater major from the University of New Hampshire and began my professional career in and around New York and at regional theaters all over the east working as both an actor and director. In 1975 I sold my motorcycle, shaved my beard and moved to the west coast.

My first work in LA was writing and performing nightclub comedy but eventually the opportunities expanded to include television, films, more stage and eventually even a published novel and a music CD. A few years back I finished a five year run portraying the outrageous Londo Mollari on the award winning sci-fi show, "Babylon 5"; however, audiences also seem to remember my work on 'Hill Street Blues' as Sid the Snitch and for a collection of various fruits and nuts throughout the eighties and nineties on a wide variety of television movies, series and appearances. (Please see filmography below)

After twenty five years in LA, I've recently migrated back to the east coast where I'm currently living with my wife and son in a small town near the Atlantic Ocean.

George R.R. Martin

Author Guest

George Raymond Richard Martin, sometimes referred to as GRRM, is an American author and screenwriter of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. He is best known for his A Song of Ice and Fire series.

George R.R. Martin was born on September 20, 1948 in Bayonne, New Jersey. As a youth, Martin became an avid reader and collector of comic books. Fantastic Four #20 (Nov 1963) features a letter to the editor he wrote while in high school. He credits the attention he received from this letter, as well as his following interest in fanzines, with his interest in becoming a writer.

Martin wrote short fiction in the early 1970s and while his start into the professional writer career was not easy (one of his stories was rejected by different magazines forty-two times) he was not discouraged and later on won several Hugo Awards and Nebula Awards. His first story to be nominated for Hugo and Nebula Award was With Morning Comes Mistfall published by Analog magazine in 1973. The story lost both Awards, but Martin didn't mind too much as joining "Hugo-and-Nebula Losers" Club was a big enough accomplishment for him.

Although much of his work is fantasy or horror, a number of his earlier works are science fiction occurring in a loosely-defined future history, known informally as 'The Thousand Worlds'. He has also written at least one piece of political-military fiction, "Night of the Vampyres", collected in Harry Turtledove's anthology The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century.

In the 1980s he turned to work in television and as a book editor. On television, he worked on the new Twilight Zone and Beauty and the Beast series. As an editor, he oversaw the lengthy Wild Cards cycle, which took place in a shared universe in which an alien virus bestowed strange powers or disfigurements on a slice of humanity during World War II, affecting the history of the world thereafter (the premise was inspired by comic book superheroes and a Superworld superhero role-playing game of which Martin was gamemaster). Contributors to the Wild Cards series included Stephen Leigh, Lewis Shiner, Howard Waldrop, Walter Jon Williams and Roger Zelazny. His own contributions to the series often featured Thomas Tudbury, "The Great and Powerful Turtle", a powerful psychokinetic whose flying "shell" consisted of an armored VW Beetle.

Martin's short story of the same name was adapted into the feature film Nightflyers (1987).

In 1996 Martin returned to writing novel-length stories, beginning his lengthy cycle A Song of Ice and Fire (ostensibly inspired by the Wars of the Roses and Ivanhoe), which is projected to run to seven volumes. In November 2005, A Feast for Crows, the fourth book in this series, became The New York Times #1 Bestseller and also achieved #1 ranking on The Wall Street Journal bestseller list. In addition, in September 2006 A Feast for Crows was nominated for both a Quill award, and the British Fantasy Award. The series has received praise from authors, publishers, readers and critics alike. Martin is currently engaged in writing A Dance With Dragons, which is the fifth book in the series.

It was announced January, 2007 that HBO Productions has purchased the broadcast rights for the entire A Song of Ice and Fire series, with the author also serving as co-executive producer on the project. The plan calls for each book from the series to be filmed over an entire season's worth of episodes. Production will take place in Europe or New Zealand and Martin is reported to have agreed to script one episode per season. Further details are expected to be announced soon.

Martin has also been an instructor in journalism (in which he holds a master's degree) and a chess tournament director. In his spare time he collects medieval-themed miniatures and continues to treasure his comic collection, which includes the first issues of Spider-Man and Fantastic Four. Although he is fairly active on the internet, he notes: "I do my writing on a completely different computer than the one I use for email and the internet, in part to guard against viruses, worms, and nightmares like this. (...) I write with WordStar 4.0 on a pure DOS-based machine."

Joel "MOjo" Moen

Artist Guest

Local artist who's works include Batman, Major Bummer, X-men Unlimited, and Night of the Living Dead: Barbara's Zombie Chronicles.

Joel "MOjo" Moen started out his career as an inking assistant to Tom Nguyen on such books as: Major Bummer, Superman- Man of Steel, JLA, Batman, and X-men Unlimited.

Soon after he was contracted to ink the book "Hellion" from upstart company Dead Dog Comics. MOjo stayed on at Dead Dog Comics for 8 years as Editor-in-Chief while also inking, writing, or scripting the books: Bad Company Incorporated, Mydevil, From Heaven to Hell, Night of the Living Dead: Barbara's Zombie Chronicles, Curse of the Blood Clan, and Cryptic Magazine.